Cyber-Attack on an American City

http://perens.com/works/articles/MorganHill/

Cyber-Attack on an American City

Bruce Perens

"Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed
down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and
cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on
the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though
startling, have gone almost un-reported.

That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its
centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost
911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone,
DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms,
ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities. In
addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's
internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources,
leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day."